School Kids Given Halloween Safety Tips

October 13, 1994|By Barbara Sherlock.

West Chicago — With pumpkins and corn stalks beginning to appear and store aisles sprouting Halloween candy and costumes, the timing seemed perfect this week to remind West Chicago schoolchildren of all the do's and don't's of safety, especially during Halloween.

As she held up a white square sign imprinted with an orange hand, Nancy Hofmann was treated to a loud chorus of "Helping Hand" from the 3rd graders she quizzed during an assembly at Indian Knolls School.

Hofmann stood before the children with her own broken foot in a cast, the result of a dance misstep, and asked what they would do if they fell on the way home from school and suffered a broken arm or leg.

One by one the children proved they knew the value of the special sign in the window if they got hurt, were lost or were being followed by someone they didn't know.

As Helping Hand coordinator, Hofmann oversees Helping Hand chairpersons at each of the city's seven schools and the program's 170 volunteer homeowners.

DuPage Sheriff's Deputy Paul Stelter warned the children of Halloween's special scares as he reviewed all the tricks of surviving what he called "The Stranger Fest."

"There will be a lot of strangers out," Stelter said. "Unfortunately a lot of bad strangers come out too. So who is a stranger and what do they look like?"

Eagerly raising their hands, the students recited a variety of answers on how to recognize a stranger-everything from `someone who acts nice but they're really bad' to `fakes having a broken arm' until they got to the one that Stelter prefers.

"Strangers look like anybody. Look in the mirror. Strangers look just like you or me or your mom or your teachers," he warned. "A person who is a bad stranger is not bad on the outside, they're bad on the inside because of what they do, but they can look and act like a good stranger."

Stelter, who is the school's Helping Hand liaison with the Sheriff's Department, reminded the children never to go trick-or-treating alone, don't go inside homes and never eat treats that have been handed out unwrapped.